Will windows not start at all or will it try to load initially and then abort? I once had a looping screen issue with a win2k laptop on which I installed both SuSE 8.1 and win98. It got fixed after I cleaned out the mbr of the HD which had been overwritten in the process and the partition numbering changed. Afterwards win2k just took the default ordering and was happy as a little babey. If this is the issue you might be able to resolve your problem by simply cleaning out the mbr and then reinstalling lilo or grub with the proper pointers to your XP partition. Another thought: If you can see the windows partition from linux you might be able to mount it and pull all your data off that way. One final thought: There are nice programs out there that will allow you to look directly at a HD. For example, take a look at an article on the forensic tool foremost which one of our local LUG members has written http://www.samag.com/documents/s=8859/sam0309a/sam0309a.htm (he wrote the article not the program). Best regards, Alex. On Sun, 26 Oct 2003, LinuxWorld999 wrote:
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SERIOUS ISSUE
This afternoon SuSE 9.0 was installed on my son's Compaq which has Windows XP Home Edition. The install program partitioned the drive and installed SuSE. However, the windows NTFS partition was corrupted rendering Windows unusable. The recovery files are on a separate partition which can also not be booted. No backup of data was made, so my son's course work has been lost. DO BE CAREFUL and backup data. I am sending this mail immediately this happened to warn other users of this problem. At the moment, I don't not even know how restore Windows at all.
My guess would be that:
1) By allowing the install to make up it's own partitions (I never do) that it upset the partition 'geometry' such that Winders doesn't know what's going on any more. (partition ordering has changed)
2) That your sons course work is probably still there and still intact if only you can get things back they way they were and then start over, with much more thought put into the process.
Just a guess. YMMV
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You are probably right. Normally, after buying a pc the drives are split in half and reformatted. The recovery CDs are then run to restore the Windows. When SuSE installer runs, the empty space is detected and selected for install. Busy times recently meant this was neglected and no backup was taken. Hard lesson to be learn't yet again!!
Regards.
LW999
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